AVON – In 1995, 20-year-old Michael Freeman sat inside a jail cell at the Avon Police Department, after being arrested for the "Natural Born Killers" slaying of 65-year-old Philip Meskinis, a disabled war veteran.

Freeman – who confessed to police that he stabbed Meskinis to death in a brutal slaying that made national headlines – tried to strike up a conversation with Martineau. Martineau said he wouldn't talk to him.

"He had an evil presence," Martineau said Monday. "I didn't want to correspond with him at all."

Police captured Freeman in Brockton after an intensive manhunt that went on for six days after the June 23, 1995, murder of Meskinis, who was found slain in his bed at his Avon home.

His throat was cut to the spine and his body had 27 stab and slash wounds. Also charged in the crime were Leonard Stanley, then 21, of Easton and Patrick Morse, then 19, of Middleboro.

The horrific slaying stunned this small town of roughly 4,400 residents. Martineau was among the officers who responded to the gruesome murder scene.

"Just the amount of hostility that went into the kill," Martineau recalled Monday. "There were a lot of puncture wounds, so much so, that a couple of the knives broke off."

The police chief wasn't surprised to learn that Freeman, now 39 and serving life without parole after his 1996 conviction for Meskinis' murder, is now charged in the murder of a 72-year-old inmate at the Souza Baranows ki Correctional Center in Shirley.

Freeman is accused of killing inmate William Sires, who was found badly beaten in a cell at the state prison in Shirley last Tuesday after noon, and died a short time later.

As in the 1995 murder in Avon, authorities said Freeman had two other accomplices in the prison murder: fellow inmates Allan Erazo, 27, and Chad Connors, 38, formerly of Avon. All three men are charged in the murder of Sires.

Back in 1995, minutes after Freeman was captured and arrived at the small Avon jail, a crowd assembled outside the jail to jeer him. A few called for vigilante justice.

"Bring him out," shouted one man at the time. "We'll take care of him right here and now."

Freeman was captured near a Brockton elementary school after six days on the run. A friend who was asked to buy cigarettes for Freeman tipped police to his whereabouts.

Police said Freeman, Morse and Stanley broke into Meskinis' home to steal his gun collection. Freeman then stabbed him to death.

After the murder, authorities said, Morse told a girlfriend who asked him about his blood-soaked clothes: "Haven't you ever seen 'Natural Born Killers' before?"

Page 2 of 2 - The 1994 movie portrays a murder spree. Authorities earlier said the trio watched it several times before the killing.

One prosecutor at the time, Gerald Pudolsky, called the slaying "the most vicious, premeditated case I've seen."

Meanwhile, outside the Avon police station on Main Street, a tree is dedicated to Meskinis, Martineau said.

Meskinis would often donate meals to police officers and firefighters on Thanksgiving Day, said Martineau and Carl Fisher, a longtime police and fire dispatcher in Avon.